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he had held on to the piece of rail and lavished care on it as his most precious possession.
    The Colonel was a bastard, a son of a whore eaten away by the pox.
    “Don’t you worry, Daddy,” Nelson murmured, turning to the steel bar, “I’ll get him, you can be sure of that; sooner or later that swine will feel the vengeance of the
cangaço
.

CHAPTER 2
    Which takes us to the terrible war that lasted for thirty years and turned the kingdoms of Europe upside down; and in which Athanasius displays rare courage on the occasion of a misadventure that could have ended very badly
    ATHANASIUS HAD JUST started his study of physics when war came to Paderborn. When, on January 6, 1622, Johann Copper gave his flock the order to flee, it was almost too late: the rabble had already surrounded the buildings. Relying solely on his courage & his faith in Our Lord, the principal of the college went out to meet the mercenaries & urge them to show mercy. They flung a flaming torch in his face. He managed to avoid it but the Lutheran fiends threw themselves on the holy man; he was given a thorough thrashing, insulted & humiliated before being tied up like an animal & dragged off to prison. He was fortunate not to be taken straight to the scaffold, on which many other Catholics no more culpable than he ended their days.
    While this was going on & to obey the orders of their superior, the eighty Jesuit pupils—not including five priests who decided to stay—left the college in small groups disguised as ordinary men. Fifteen of them were captured & taken to join the principal in prison. Accompanied by another student, Athanasius & Friedrich managed to leave the town with no problem.
    On February 7, 1622 they reached the banks of the Rhine, in the vicinity of Düsseldorf. The river had frozen over only recently but the locals indicated a section where the ice was thicker & it was possible to cross—which was a brazen lie dictated solely by the desire to save money! The custom was to pay some poor devil every year to cross the river & thus test the ice. The three strangers were a godsend for the country folk & it was solely to save a few coppers that these miserly peasants showed no mercy & lied to then. In those times of misery & hardship men’s lives, &
a fortiori
the lives of strangers who seemed to be vile deserters, were not worth a cabbage stalk. The skinflints showed them a path by which, they claimed, everyone went across without mishap.
    With the hotheadedness of youth & his experience of skating, Kircher took the lead & went on, twenty paces ahead of the other two, to make sure they at least would be safe. The weather was worsening rapidly. Masses of fog drifting down from the north were threatening to hide the shore. Athanasius hurried on. When he reached the middle of the river, he saw to his horror that the ice was melting there. He immediately turned around in order to rejoin his companions & warn them of the danger, but with an ominous cracking noise the ice split between him & his friends with the result that the part he was standing on started to drift on open water. Carried along by the current, shouting himself hoarse on his ice floe, Athanasius disappeared in the mist.
    Fearing for his life, the young man threw himself wholeheartedly into prayer. After sweeping perilously downstream, by a happy chance the ice-raft came close to the frozen part of the river & Kircher nimbly jumped onto it &, without wasting a moment, set off for dry land & the completion of the crossing. However, at about twenty cubits from the bank, while he was still thanking Our Lord for letting him escape from such a dangerous situation, & fairly comfortably too, the ice split in front of him again. Blue with cold, covered in bruises from his repeated falls, Athanasius did not hesitate for one second but threw himself into the icy water & after a few strokes, which called on all his experience as a swimmer, managed to pull himself up onto the bank, more